The People's Permacomputer (henceforth known as "the people's computer", or "the permacomputer") is a project dedicated to resourcing the specification, and then construction of a 'permacomputer'.
- Who are the people running this project?
- What is a permacomputer?
- What is the point of this project?
- What distinguishes this project from the others?
- What previous historical traditions inspire this project?
"The Committee"
Yes you can join the committee.
The ultimate goal of the project is to construct computers which will last a really long time, and still stay operational.
This project should largely be regarded as a piece of art. If someone finds some practical use for what we are building, however, that would also give us joy.
It is a project pipe-dream to end up manufacturing permacomputer units at a kind of cottage-industry level, perhaps something for a worker's co-operative to do. These units will be really, really cheap--if it's not cheap, it's not accessible to the poor.
The original purpose of this project was to design and then construct computers that would be able to survive a societal collapse.
After working on the project, it became apparent that the point of the project should not be to imagine a hypothetical future, but to engage practically with the problems of the present.
The entire computing stack of the modern era is large, confusing, and unsafe. People would rather excuse themselves from having to learn about it. Who can blame them?
The first aim of the project is to be exceedingly cost effective: "if the oppressed cannot access some technology, then it is not revolutionary".
The second aim of the project is the promotion of digital literacy. Digital literacy should promote a joyful user experience that is non-exploitative. It should also foster a sense of community--"no-one is an island".
To this end, the scope of the people's permacomputer project was deliberately limited to programs around or just over 100 lines. Definitely not more than 200.
The project therefore decided to investigate BASIC as the paradigmatic human-computer interface for the permacomputer.
For the application towards which it was targeted, the investigation the project has done so far into BASIC has been fruitful, and even quite surprising--the 70s/80s hobby computing scene was far richer and more creative than the project previously assumed: not less than five (5) different text editors in BASIC were unearthed!
OLD.
There are many influential projects which attempt to address the same set of values driving the people's permacomputer project. Some worthy of note can be listed in no particular order:
- Collapse OS.
- uxn.
- The RC2014 computer kit.
- Ben Eater's 6502 project video series.
All of these projects are concerned with some subset of the principles the permacomputer project holds dear. Collapse OS is software that aims to be system agnostic, and assumes the previous acquisition of some supported hardware.
We seem to take it for granted that a computer in everyone's hand just is democratic computing. Indeed, the ubiquity of contemporary computation has been confused for 'democracy'.
As quickly as we marched towards computing for the masses, we marched just as swiftly away.